Faculty Members at Yale (Year 2007-2008)
Year 2007-2008
Junko KATO
September 2007- August 2008
Takuji OKAMOTO
October 2007- March 2008
Junko KATO
Ph.D. in Political Science (Yale, 1992)
Professor of Political Science, Graduate Schools for Law and Politics at the University of Tokyo
When I was a graduate student at Yale from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, Japanese studies attracted both public and scholarly attention in the United States. Japan’s political stability and policy continuity were often attributed to the uniqueness of the Japanese political economic system and society. On the contrary, among the Asian countries much attention today is absorbed by China. Some deplore declining interest in Japan. However, I do not necessarily think this disadvantageous to the promotion of Japanese studies. In the 1980s a very distorted description and inaccurate picture dominated public understanding of Japan, which inevitably influenced academic discourse. Now we have a much better context for more careful, thoughtful and reliable research in Japanese studies.
I started my Ph.D. program in political science with an interest in studying Japanese politics from a comparative perspective. I have developed this interest into multiple country studies, comparing plural democratic countries in North America, Europe and East Asia. This research experience lead to the publication of two books in comparative politics and has enabled me to develop my own perspective on Japanese studies. There are two distinct academic practices in the field of Japanese studies. One is examining first-hand materials and information in depth and ensuring a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the facts and cases. The other is rephrasing the facts and cases particular to Japan so as to compare with those of other countries and societies and/or finding a specific pattern or rule in observed behavior and mechanisms. These two practices are often regarded as incompatible with and contradictory to each other. However, I believe that a mutual reinforcement is possible between them. I am also convinced that the Todai-Yale Initiative will be an ideal vehicle for this. In the Initiative those in humanities and in the social sciences will work together closely both at Todai and Yale.
I have further strengthened the interdisciplinary and comparative orientation of my research. I am now extending my research interests to include questions relating to more basic patterns and essential rules in human behavior using cognitive scientific approaches. This is still a very new field in Japan and in the United States. I am analyzing human judgment of political differences applying geometric models to human cognition as well as working on political psychological experiments using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). In this growing field, I am organizing the Todai-Yale Initiative symposium titled “Mind, Brain, and Society: Neurocognitive Approaches to the Social Sciences” (Luce Hall Auditorium, Yale University, April 25, 2008) with Marvin Chun as a co-organizer.
Selected publications in English
Books
Regressive Taxation and the Welfare State, Cambridge University Press. 2003.
The Problem of Bureaucratic Rationality: Tax Politics in Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1994.
Single-Authored articles
"Public Pension Reforms in the United States and Japan: A Study of Comparative Public Policy," Comparative Political Studies, vol. 24, no. 1 (1991): 100-126.
“Rationality and Institution in Politics: Three Varieties of Neo-Institutionalists,”
British Journal of Political Science, vol. 26, part 4 (1996): 553-582.
“When the Party Breaks Up: Exit and Voice among Japanese Legislators,” American Political Science Review, vol. 92, no.4 (December 1998): 857-870.
Co-Authored Articles
With Michael Laver, “Theories of Government Formation and the 1996 General Election in Japan,” Party Politics, vol. 4, no. 2 (1998): 229-252.
With Michael Laver, “Dynamic Approaches to Government Formation and the Generic Instability of Decisive Structures in Japan,” Electoral Studies, vol. 20, no.4 (December 2001): 509-527.
With Bo Rothstein, "Government Partisanship and Managing the Economy: Japan and Sweden in Comparative Perspective," Governance. vol. 19, no.1 (January 2006): 75-98.
Book Chapter
"Internal party organization in the Italian Christian democrats and Japanese liberal democrats: factional competition for office, clienteles, and corrupt exchange," in Junichi Kawata ed. Comparing Political Corruption and Clientelism (London: Ashgate Publisher, 2006) (With Carol Mershon).
On-Going Works
“Competition for Power: Party Switching as a Means of Changing Party Systems in Japan” (with Kentaro Yamamoto; forthcoming in a volume edited by Carol Mershon and William Heller)
“Coalition Governments, Party Switching, and the Rise and Decline of Parties: Changing Japanese Politics since 1993” (with Yuto Kannon; under review)
“Euclid was sometimes an unnecessarily sophisticated social scientist: Geometric modeling of political difference” (with Kensuke Okada; draft)
“Diversification of political space into Minkowski metrics” (with Kensuke Okada; draft)
Takuji OKAMOTO, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of History and Philosophy of Science,
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo
Current Research Interest
- Evolution of the Japanese Scientific Community since the Meiji Restoration
- Role of Science, Technology, and Higher Education in the Modernization of Japan
- History of Modern Physics
- Use of Historic Scientific Instruments for Science and Technology Studies
Self-introduction and Research Plan at the Todai-Yale Initiative
Thirteen years ago I visited the United States for the first time. Though I had already started to work as an assistant professor at Niigata University, I stayed at Harvard University as a graduate student and worked mainly at the university archives gathering materials for my Ph.D. dissertation. My research at that time was on the scientific and philosophical activities of the Harvard Physicist Percy Williams Bridgman (1882-1961), and what I should do at Harvard was quite obvious: during my one year stay, I spent almost all week days reading and transcribing manuscripts, correspondence, and research notes of this relatively unknown scientist.
Since then, my scope in research has broadened into other areas and periods: the history of electrical engineering, the role of science and technology in the modernization of Japan and the growth of the Japanese scientific community in the international setting. However, the style of my research - spending as long as possible in archival research - has not undergone noticeable change, though I now understand that university teachers cannot afford to spend their time as freely as in their student days.
My half-year stay at Yale is a rare chance to conduct my favorite style of research at one of the best equipped university archives. I hope to show that the research and survey of historical sources at Yale can shed new light upon the historical study of Japanese science, technology, and higher education. Below are some of the topics I am now pursuing:
- Arinori Mori, who served as the first Minister of Education of the Meiji Government, considered the American educational system to be ideal for Japan. He went so far as to survey the school systems of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and asked the opinions of several prominent American scholars, including Joseph Henry, Charles Eliot, and Theodore Woolsey, about his ideas on educational policies. Mori told the Yale linguist William Whitney about his plan to adopt English as Japan’s official language (Whitney, who valued non-western languages linguistically, politely pointed out the shortcomings of this idea). Further study of Mori’s interaction with American scholars will show unforeseen aspects of his country’s concerns with the role of science and education at the start of its push for westernization.
- Though some pivotal scientists in modern Japan have been known to have studied at Yale, the details of their university lives have remained unclear. Kenjiro Yamakawa, a physicist-teacher who later became President of Tokyo Imperial University, studied civil engineering at the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale University. The abundant archival materials of the “Sheff School” housed in the university archives will help clarify how and what Yamakawa studied in New Haven.
- Shunkichi Kimura is known as a physicist who developed the wireless communication technology that turned out to be a crucial scientific weapon during the Battle of the Sea of Japan in 1905. A less known fact is that Kimura earned his Ph.D. from Yale University under the auspices of J. Willard Gibbs, one of the best-known scientists America has ever produced. Historical analysis of Kimura’s research at Yale will reveal Kimura’s educational background that led to the success of his wireless devices and Gibbs’s hitherto unknown interaction with the Japanese physicist.
My recent publications in English include:
Takuji OKAMOTO, “Science and Competition: The Case of Physics in Japan, 1886-1949,” UTCP (University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy) Bulletin, VI (2006), pp. 57-67
Takuji OKAMOTO, “The Reconstruction of the Electric Power Industry,” in Shigeru Nakayama et al., eds., A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan, vol. 2 (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2005), pp. 414-453.
Takuji OKAMOTO, “Percy Williams Bridgman and the Establishment of Theoretical Physics at Harvard,” Historia Scientiarum, 14:1 (2004), pp. 1-48.
Takuji OKAMOTO, “Uncertainty and Controllability: Bridgman, Dingler, and Dewey,” Historia Scientiarum, 12:3 (2003), pp. 233-253.
Takuji OKAMOTO, “The Reorganization of the Electric Power Industry in Japan,” in Shigeru Nakayama et al., eds., A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan, vol. 1 (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2001), pp. 319-352.
